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Baron Munchausen said:
I have heard this will create a disaster...
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Fortunately, reality is much different from what you have heard. This isn't windows 98 we are talking about, here. Sure winnt's boot loader is no Grub, but it works fairly well when you stick within the realm of Windows OSes...
Narf:
An OS installation on a second HDD (or partition) is just treated as normal files when you are booted into a different OS. Install time is a little different; if you leave the drive in the compie when you install XP Pro, it will detect the second OS installation and create two entries in the boot loader, one for the old and one for the new. You will then be able to choose which of the OSes to boot into.
Assuming you plan to delete XP Home once you have XP Pro up and running (a sage course of action), I'd recommend that you take out the second HDD, install XP Pro on the new HDD, then reconnect the old HDD to copy data. This way, the 500 GB drive will be treated as the master drive/partition and the boot loader will be placed on it for your XP Pro installation. It will also save you hassles later when you go to delete the XP Home installation to reuse the disk (namely, you won't have a useless entry in your boot loader).
Also, I'd recommend that you create two partitions; one at 10 GB and one using the remaining space. The 10 GB partition will be just for windows. Data and programs would then go on the other partition. This makes it easier to reformat and reinstall windows in the future, should the need arise. You can remap My Documents type folders with TweakUI (part of XP Power Toys) if it is too much hassle to not use them.